By Victor Greto
BEAR — She is a stay-at-home suburban mother of two who only writes what she knows about.
And what Donna Fasano knows is the most commercially successful narrative in all of modern publishing: the plot of the romance novel.
“I never get tired of that story,” says Fasano, who has written 32 girl-tames-wounded-man novels in 17 years for Harlequin Romance’s Silhouette line.
Strawberry-blond hair crowning a peaches-and-cream complexion, Fasano beams almost as brightly as the sunshine streaming through her 3-story townhouse’s kitchen windows.
The woman can’t help it. She’s in love with love, and those plots — in which a woman inevitably salves a man’s pain and claims his heart through love and commitment — express for her what love is all about.
“Every woman wants to heal that male wounded soul,” she says.
Before you roll those eyes, think about it: Even the most staid suburban home is likely to have begun with a hot romance.
Fasano says she and Bill, her husband of 28-years-and-counting, are still in love, the way her characters are in love, she says. That is, as they would be three decades after the passion first flamed.
She reflects that personal journal in her newest work: no longer just a romance novel, but a new branch of women’s fiction designed for those ready to move beyond the bodice-ripping thrill of first love, ready to admit that Mr. Hunky isn’t always the one you go home with.
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Bill Fasano inspired her to take up writing romance fiction. He told her to.
It was a casual remark, he says, made in a state of domesticated exasperation in the late 1980s.
During her first decade of marriage, Donna devoured a couple of Harlequin romances a week. One day, Bill noticed a stack of Harlequin novels by the bed.
“You know you’ve read enough of those,” he told her. “You ought to write one.”
Today, he says, “It was an offhand sort of comment made more with the idea of can-we-really-afford-to-buy-that-many-books sort of thing.”
If that’s sounds unromantic, consider this: He has yet to read a word of his wife’s books, which have sold nearly 4 million copies in more than a dozen languages, including French, German and Japanese.
“I’ve received mail I can’t even read without help,” she says.
And it’s no big deal to either of them. “I have a great fan base,” she says. “I have a certain readership.”
“Donna and I are polarized that way,” says Bill Fasano, a toxicologist for DuPont. “My life and life’s work is all in the sciences, and I spend the majority of my time entertaining myself with that sort of stuff.”
He listens as she goes over the plots she’s working out in her head, so he does have an idea about what each novel is about. But that’s about it.
“I have a tremendous level of value for my wife and what she does,” Bill says. “If she found her passion in life, that gives me great satisfaction.”
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Bill Fasano isn’t exactly Donna’s target market, and there’s definitely a target market.
Romance novels “follow a strict formula, in specific, coded language,” says William A Gleason, an associate professor of English at Princeton University.
“What they deliver is not a high aesthetic experience, but a repeated engagement of the successful taming of brutal devilish outsider male figure.”
The structure of the romance novel is well known.
A slow but deliberate mating dance of a man and woman who starts with intense dislike. They don’t want to be with each other, but are forced to via a conflict. The man, often with chiseled features, full lips and expressive eyes — all of which harbor a wounded but sensitive soul — needs his passion and hurt channeled in a more productive way.
Enter the woman to soothe the hurt and tame that passion, creating a fruitful partnership — with her. Mix in a powerful sexual attraction, a final conflict and a happy resolution — and you have the basic plots of nearly half of all the paperbacks sold in the U.S. — not to mention big-budget romantic comedies.
The romance novel isn’t a modern literary invention.
It evolved from the gothic novels of the 18th century, Gleason says. Those novels were filled with supernatural horrors, mystery and often violence and horror. Both Mary Shelley’s 1831 “Frankenstein,” and Bram Stoker’s 1897 “Dracula” are examples.
The gothic tale merged with the polite, domestic novel, the latter intricately perfected by Jane Austen in the early 19th century, from “Sense and Sensibility” to “Pride and Prejudice.”
“All of that gothic virility was brought into a heterosexual, loving relationship, domesticated but not diminished,” Gleason says.
Some excellent early gothic romances include the mid-19th-century Bronte sisters’ “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.”
Yet in today’s romance novels, the sophistication of the Brontes’ work is simplified for easier mass consumption.
“In the romance novel, the man always commits to the relationship,” Gleason says.
The romance novel’s predictable plots are part of the reason for their incredible success. The books are expertly honed for and distributed by Harlequin to a specific audience. About 64 million Americans read at least one romance novel in 2004, and helped account for $1.2 billion in sales.
And the industry makes no pretensions toward longevity.
Most romance novels, including Fasano’s, are parts of a series and are numbered, appearing in bookstores for only a month.
Fasano has written several series, including novel trilogies such as “Single Doctor Dads” and “The Thunder Clan.”
Like Fasano, many readers subscribe to Harlequin and receive a different book in the mail every few weeks.
Scholars have studied why people devour these novels and the answers are surprisingly simple: They offer escape and hope, at $.4.25 a copy.
“They read these books to escape form the pressures of their own domestic responsibilities, and compare them to watching soap operas,” Gleason says.
For those who scoff at romance novels, Tara Gavin, editorial director of Harlequin Books, asks if they ever bothered to read one.
“It’s an optimistic way of looking at the world,” she says. “They’re about hope, changing your life and being able to make a difference.”
Harlequin created an empire from knowing their audience — mostly married but also single women — and peoples its novels with physically attractive, sensual men..
“His shoulders were broad and muscular beneath his wet denim shirt,” reads Fasano’s description of her male protagonist in “Bound by Honor,” her latest romance, “clear evidence that, whatever he did for a living, he worked hard. Rain saturated his long hair, turning it to a slick, black river that coursed down his back. He certainly was solid. Well built. A stone wall of a man….”
Even so, Gleason says, the plots are not reflexively anti-feminist.
“The female protagonists are intelligent, spunky, feminist heroines in an anti-feminist plot,” he says. “The readers regard the heroines as possible other selves for themselves.”
Her features were delicate, Fasano wrote of her lead woman character in “Bound by Honor” — gracefully arched eyebrows, thick lashes framing almond-shaped eyes, a pert little nose. Her pale skin glowed with the iridescence of moonlight, fresh and shimmery. The noonday sun burnished her shoulder-length auburn hair, the ends curling softly and resting against the topmost part of her full, rounded breasts.
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“I base all of my heroes on me,” Donna Fasano says in her sunny kitchen.
She grew up with two older brothers and two younger ones in Elkton, Md., planning to become a teacher.
But when Donna was 12, her 36-year-old mother died from complications after a gall-bladder operation.
“Before I was a teenager, I became a mom to my brothers,” she says, and spent her teens babysitting, cooking and cleaning.
“My father was so busy, working and keeping us together. It was hard. But we grew very close.”
She escaped by reading, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and also Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Then she met Bill. She was 15 and Bill was 18 when she met the Brooklyn-born Fasano at a friend’s party.
“Talk about love at first sight. He was yummy.”
And intelligent.
“I’d never met anyone so smart before in my life,” she says.
She told him she was 16.
Her father would not allow her to date until she turned 17. “We sat on the couch and watched TV for two years,” she says.
But they married the next year. Their first child, Bill Jr., was born shortly after. Their other son, John, was born in 1981.
“By 22, I had two kids, a car and a house payment,” she says. They lived in Newark, where Bill Fasano first starting working for DuPont, and she dived into Harlequin romances.
“I loved happy endings, and the hunky guys weren’t bad, either,” she says.
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It took Fasano 18 months to meet her husband’s challenge and write her first romance, “Mountain Laurel,” about a forest ranger and a heroine from Dewey Beach. She finished the manuscript in 1989.
Although her first manuscript lost the contest in which she submitted, Harlequin’s Gavin, a contest judge, saw a “spark” in it.
“Her first book was charming and refreshing,” Gavin says, “a story that had a lot to say about falling in love, the excitement of first love.”
Fasano decided to write under a pseudonym, because, well, that’s what romance writers do. She chose “Donna Clayton,” using her grandfather’s first name as her last.
But after a decade and a half of perfecting the romance plot, Fasano is changing directions, if only slightly on the literary compass.
Her new novel, “Where’s Stanley?” follows the frantic, serio-comic life of a woman who is so busy caring for her busy Hockessin family that she doesn’t notice her husband isn’t coming home anymore.
The novel is one of Harlequin’s new women’s fiction line, “The Next Novel.” These titles cater to women beyond first love, marriage and childbirth, women ready to move into the next stage of their lives, Harlequin’s Gavin said.
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“Where’s Stanley?” is more complex, funny and realistic — and 100 pages longer — than Fasano’s most recent romance novel, “Bound by Honor.” It’s carefully structured plot and standard 180-page length details the romance between Jenna Butler and Gage Dalton.
It ends with Gage, hurt by the deaths of his wife and child, choosing to stop feeling sorry for himself and take care of Jenna and Lily, her niece. Gage and Jenna met at the accident that killed Lily’s mother.
“We were meant to meet on that rainy road,” he said. “That day was the beginning of my rebirth. And I was too blind to see it.” He inched closer. “What I’m trying to say, Jenna, is that I love you. I want you. And Lily. Here. With me.”
From the first pages, you know how “Bound by Honor” will end.
You can’t be so sure about “Where’s Stanley?”
Identifying with Fiona, the wife in “Where’s Stanley?” was easy for Denise McNeice of Northeast, Md., who read the novel with her book club.
“I did like it, but I didn’t think she should have taken Stanley back,” McNeice says, giving away the ending. “I’m married and have children, and he just left out of the blue.”
McNeice says she wanted Fiona to end up with the sexy Italian cop Chad DeSalvo — another double for Bill Fasano? — who helps Fiona search for Stanley.
Not all of her book club members agreed.
“Some of us were thinking she would end up with the cop, but we were happy that she stuck with her husband,” says Jill Jicha of Elkton, Md.
Fasano originally ended the book with Fiona going with DeSalvo.
But Gavin asked her to change it, and give the book more of a domestic-driven happy ending, not a romantic-driven happy ending.
“Each line has its own promise to the reader,” Gavin says.
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The more realistic ending, however, seems more true to Fasano and her claim of writing from her own life.
Although Bill has never left — or contemplated leaving — Donna, Fiona’s re-embrace of Stanley before she rushes off to bake muffins is a version of the suburban normalcy in which Donna Fasano lives every day.
“We’re no different than anyone else,” Bill Fasano says. “We put on our pants one leg at a time, try to make it, raise our kids, keep our heads down and keep going.
“If there’s success to be told, that’s the success — that we had nothing, and although we are more comfortable today, we work real hard to sustain what we have.”
For Donna Fasano, it doesn’t get any more romantic than that.